But I can easily instruct you by an example, so that you may clearly enough perceive that this present life is very like a shadow, and in that shadow no man can attain the true good. If any very great man is driven from his country, or goes on his lord's errand, and so comes to a foreign people, where no man knows him, nor he any man, nor even knows the language, do you think his greatness can make him honorable in that land? Of course it cannot. But if dignity were natural to wealth and were its own, or again if wealth were the rich man's own, then it could not forsake him. Let the man who possessed them be in whatsoever land he might, then his wealth and his dignity would be with him. But because the wealth and the power are not his own, they forsake him; and because they have no natural good in themselves, they go away like a shadow or smoke. Yet the mistaken opinion and fancy of unwise men judge that power is the highest good. It is entirely otherwise. When a great man is either among foreigners, or among wise men in his own country, his wealth counts nothing to either one when they learn that he was exalted for no virtue, but through the applause of the ignorant. But if his power arose from any personal merit, he would keep that even if he lost the power. He would not lose the good that came from nature; that would always follow him and always make him honorable, whatever land he was in....
Worthless and very false is the glory of this world! Concerning this a certain poet formerly sung. When he contemned this present life, he said:--O glory of this world! wherefore do erring men call thee, with false voice, glory, when thou art none!--For man more frequently has great renown, and great glory, and great honor, through the opinion of the unwise, than he has through his deserts. But tell me now, what is more unmeet than this; or why men may not rather be ashamed of themselves than rejoice, when they hear that any one belies them. Though men even rightly praise any one of the good, he ought not the sooner to rejoice immoderately at the people's words. But at this he ought to rejoice, that they speak truth of him. Though he rejoice at this, that they spread his name, it is not the sooner so extensively spread as he persuades himself; for they cannot spread it over all the earth, though they may in some land; for though it be to one known, yet it is to another unknown. Though he in this land be celebrated, yet is he in another not celebrated. Therefore is the people's favor to be held by every man for nothing; since it comes not to every man according to his deserts, nor indeed remains always to any one. Consider first concerning noble birth. If any one boast of it, how vain and how useless is the boast; for every one knows that all men come from one father and from one mother. Or again, concerning the people's favor, and concerning their applause, I know not why we rejoice at it. Though they whom the vulgar applaud be illustrious, yet are they more illustrious and more rightly to be applauded who are dignified by virtues. For no man is really the greater or the more praiseworthy for the excellence of another, or for his virtues, if he himself has it not. Are you ever the fairer for another man's beauty? A man is little the better though he have a good father, if he himself is incapable of anything. Therefore I advise that you rejoice in other men's good and their nobility, but so far only that you ascribe it not to yourself as your own; because every man's good, and his nobility, is more in the mind than in the flesh. This only, indeed, I know of good in nobility: that it shames many a man if he is worse than his ancestors were, and he therefore endeavors with all his power to imitate the manners of some one of the best, and his virtues.
NICHOLAS BOILEAU-DESPRÉAUX
(1636-1711)
he name of Louis XIV. suggests ultra-lavishness in life and taste; a time when French society, surfeited with pleasure, demanded a stimulus of continual novelty in current literature. The natural result was preciosité, hyperbole, falsetto sentiment, which ranked the unusual above the natural, clever conceit above careful workmanship. It was tainted with artificiality, and now seems mawkish and superficial.
But Boileau changed all that. Perhaps no author unendowed with genius has ever so influenced literature,
